Articles, insights, and news about DNA ancestry testing and genetic genealogy.
Ancient DNA | Classical Sicily | The battles of Himera Who fought for the Greeks at Himera? In 480 BC, a Greek army crus...
Ancient DNA | Micronesia | First settlers of Remote Oceania Who first crossed the open Pacific? Long before Polynesians ...
Ancient DNA | Roman Britain | Eboracum Who were the headless gladiators of Roman York? More than 80 young men were burie...
Ancient DNA | Chile and the Southern Cone | Mapuche origins Who were the first Mapuche ancestors? The largest Indigenous...
Ancient DNA | Neolithic and Beaker Britain | Stonehenge and Orkney Stonehenge's builders did not simply vanish Newcomers...
Y-DNA | R1b-V88 | Lake Chad Basin and Western Europe Do the Masa really carry Europe's R1b? A widely shared post says th...
Ancient DNA | New France | Colonial Montreal Did French settlers really mix with Native Americans? Many Quebecers and Fr...
Ancient DNA | Viking Age | Scandinavia and the North Atlantic The Vikings weren't all Scandinavian Picts buried with swo...
Guest contribution | Y-DNA | Iron Age Judah to Ashkenazi Europe An Iron Age Israelite and the J-M92 family A man buried ...
Ancient DNA | Jomon, Yayoi, Kofun | Japan and the Ryukyus Japan is made of three peoples, not two Every Japanese schoolb...
Ancient DNA | Medieval migrations | India to Europe Where did the Roma come from? For five centuries Europe guessed: Egy...
Ancient DNA | Hunter-gatherers | Tierra del Fuego The last Selk'nam They hunted guanaco across the grasslands of Tierra ...
Ancient DNA | Y chromosome | Copper and Bronze Age Europe The Kurgan Fathers Between 2900 and 2000 BC, the descendants o...
Ancient DNA | Eneolithic and Bronze Age | Caucasus, Volga, Anatolia Where did the Indo-Europeans really come from? For t...
Ancient DNA | Late Mesolithic | Brittany, France The women of Téviec Seven thousand years ago, on two small islands off ...
Ancient DNA | Hallstatt Iron Age | Burgundy, France The Lady of Vix: what DNA now says She was buried around 500 BC with...
Ancient DNA | Avar Khaganate | 7th century Hungary The Avar woman who looked east In grave 7 of an elite cemetery on the...
Ancient DNA | North Africa | Atlantic islands The Guanches: Berbers who crossed the sea and never sailed again When Cast...
Population genetics | South America | Language and DNA Paraguay: the nation that speaks its mothers' language Most Parag...
Ancient DNA | Late Antiquity | Myth file Who were the Huns? The DNA of Attila's empire For 250 years historians have arg...
Ancient DNA | Medieval and Early Modern India | Mystery file Roopkund, the Skeleton Lake Hundreds of human bones lie in ...
Ancient DNA | Old Kingdom Egypt | Mystery file The first complete ancient Egyptian genome A potter buried in a clay pot ...
Ancient DNA | Bronze Age Europe | Mystery file Tollense: who fought Europe's oldest battle? Around 1250 BC, thousands of...
Hero image: AI generated illustration of a Late Bronze Age plank boat approaching a rocky Atlantic headland at dawn. Not...
Hero image: AI generated illustration evoking the leprosy confusion theory of Cagot origin, a hooded figure and a generi...
Hero image: artistic reconstruction of a generic 15th century Iberian merchant, not a verified likeness of Columbus. No ...
Ancient Rome was the capital of an empire of roughly 70 million people, and in 2019 a team led by Margaret Antonio and J...
The Spanish and Portuguese who crossed the Atlantic after 1492 were, in overwhelming majority, men. What they left behin...
Nine men, all young to middle-aged, buried together in a moat dug into the eastern side of medieval Sidon, in a pit date...
In 2023 a team led by Tristan Begg sequenced DNA extracted from five authenticated locks of Ludwig van Beethoven's hair,...
Roughly sixty thousand years ago, small groups of the people who would become every non-African population alive today i...
He died on a rock shelf at 3,210 metres, shot from behind with an arrow that tore his subclavian artery, and he lay in t...
Their own tradition names the date: about 175 BCE, seven men and seven women, the sole survivors of a shipwreck off the ...
The idea is that people from Ice Age France and Spain crossed the North Atlantic along the edge of the pack ice, landed ...
Somewhere around three thousand years ago a language began to spread west across Europe, and by the time anyone wrote it...
In September 1588 the wreckage of the Spanish Armada came ashore along the Atlantic coast of Ireland, twenty four ships ...
Three thousand years ago people pushed a canoe off a beach somewhere in the Bismarck Archipelago and sailed east into an...
In 126 BC an envoy named Zhang Qian came back to the Han court after thirteen years in the west, and the road he describ...
For two centuries the square barrows and dismantled chariots of the Yorkshire Wolds have been read as the calling card o...
Somewhere between twenty-five and forty million people call themselves Fulani, Fulbe, Peul or Haalpulaar, and they are s...
Haplogroup I1 is carried by something like a third of Swedish men, a third of Norwegian men and a third of Danish men, a...
In January 2025 a team led by Lara Cassidy and Daniel Bradley published fifty-seven genomes from Durotrigian cemeteries ...
Ukrainian, Belarusian and Russian are the three East Slavic languages, and the grouping is real: they separated from one...
Around 3300 BC a burial rite appeared on the steppe north of the Black and Caspian seas: a single body, on its back with...
Between about 2900 and 2300 BC a single burial rite, a single pot shape and a single stone axe spread from the Rhine to ...
Roughly two thirds of the Jews of France describe themselves as Sephardic. Sefarad is the medieval Hebrew name for the I...
Korean population history is usually told as a sequence of three arrivals: millet farmers from the West Liao River in th...
Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean is probably the most intensively studied founder population on earth. One person in five carries...
The Kurds are usually introduced through their politics, and after that through their language, and only rarely through ...
Almost everything written about the Jews of Yemen begins with the word oldest. They are said to descend from men sent by...
In 2003 a team from the Sanger Institute reported that about eight per cent of men across a huge swathe of Asia, roughly...
The Gagauz speak a language that a visitor from Istanbul can follow almost without effort. They are also Orthodox Christ...
In the summer of 681 the Byzantine emperor Constantine IV signed a treaty with a nomad chieftain named Asparukh and agre...
In 1997 a British anthropologist followed a sacred drum and an oral tradition from the northern Transvaal to a ruined to...
Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic were handed the same three ingredients. Spanish settlers arrived first, an ...
For a people whose name became a common noun in every European language, the Vandals have left astonishingly little behi...
For a civilization that ran cities, moved water through desert canals and traded lapis lazuli from Afghanistan to Mesopo...
Few origin claims in Europe are argued as fiercely, or with as much political charge, as the Albanian one. Albanians des...
In the late 5th and early 6th century AD, several women buried in cemeteries across Bavaria were laid to rest with skull...
Modern Assyrians, Chaldeans and Syriacs, the Christian Aramaic-speaking communities of northern Iraq, north-eastern Syri...
On the Facebook page for this blog, a reader recently asked a fair question: could the Roma, Europe's largest and most p...
Somewhere on almost every continent there is a people who will tell you they are one of the ten lost tribes of Israel, c...
Somewhere in most white American families, and a good many others, there is a story about a Cherokee ancestor, usually a...
Aeta in Luzon, Semang in the Malay Peninsula, Onge and Jarawa in the Andaman Islands: three groups separated by thousand...
Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians are routinely grouped together as one genetic package, the Baltic cluster that Europ...
Finland has fascinated medical geneticists for decades because of a paradox: a population that looks, on a map, like jus...
In the high valleys of the Pamirs and the Zarafshan, a handful of communities still speak languages that belong to the E...
Ossetians are usually introduced as the last living heirs of the Alans, Iranian-speaking Sarmatian horsemen who dominate...
For decades, popular accounts of the Indo-Aryan migration into India have cast the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Compl...
The Parsis are the descendants of Zoroastrians who fled Persia after the Arab conquest of the Sasanian Empire, settling ...
The word "Slavic" covers roughly 300 million people and a dozen modern nations, from the Baltic to the Balkans. Populati...
The Bedouin is one of the great romantic figures of the popular imagination: the tent in the open desert, the camel, the...
For more than a thousand years the Picts were a mystery wrapped in a legend. The Venerable Bede, writing in the eighth c...
A claim drifts around the internet, sometimes well meant, sometimes not: that the Metis are a people you can read off a ...
Some time around 1462 a Portuguese ship dropped anchor off an island that had never held a human footprint. Within a lif...
Around four thousand years ago, on the dry grassland east of the Ural mountains, a people learned to yoke horses to a li...
In two caves in the wet green hills of western Georgia, archaeologists found the bones of men who had been dead for more...
No population on Earth carries a more thoroughly documented three-way mixture than the Brazilians. Over five centuries, ...
For a long time the story of the Germanic peoples was told as a single arrival: a wave of horse-riding steppe newcomers ...
Ask which Y-chromosome lineage is the signature of the Atlantic fringe, and the answer is always the same: R-L21. It is ...
No two living languages sit closer together than English and Frisian, the coastal tongue of the northern Netherlands, an...
Across the mountains of Greece, Albania, North Macedonia, Bulgaria and Romania lives a scattered people who count, pray ...
For two thousand years the Sarmatians have been filed under a single word: Scythians. Same sea of grass, same horse, sam...
Look at a highland Ethiopian and a century of observers reached for the same word: half. Half African, half something fr...
Cross the Channel from Cornwall and you land among people who, on a genetic map, are almost impossible to tell apart fro...
They wore felt hats and tartan-style wool, some had brown or reddish hair and deep-set faces, and a thousand years after...
Few peoples can look at a stranger who died six thousand years ago and recognise a relative. Armenians can. When you pla...
They dress plainly, marry within the fold, and have kept to themselves for almost five centuries. The Amish, the Mennoni...
The Tajiks are the great Iranian-speaking people of Central Asia, spread across Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Uzbekistan, ...
Sepharad is the Hebrew name for Iberia, and the Sephardim are the Jews who made Spain and Portugal their home for the be...
Malta speaks the only Semitic language with official status anywhere in Europe. Maltese is a daughter of Siculo-Arabic, ...
A few thousand polytheists in the high valleys of the Hindu Kush, the Kalash attract a particular kind of legend: lost s...
Around the year 895 a confederation of horse-riding tribes crossed the Carpathians and seized the great plain of the mid...
Belgium is built around a border you cannot see on the ground. The language line splits Dutch-speaking Flanders in the n...
Most of France is, genetically, a quiet place: a slow cline of Iron Age Celts gently leavened, here and there, by what c...
Europe is, genetically, a remarkably smooth place. Walk from Lisbon to Stockholm to Warsaw and the gene pool slides gent...
Most ancient DNA stories are about where a people came from. The Durotriges of Iron Age Dorset tell a rarer one: here it...
The Hittites carried an Indo-European language without the steppe genes that mark every other Indo-European people. The ...
The Hittites and the Beta Israel are two negatives: a language and a religion that travelled without their expected gene...
The Beta Israel, the Jews of Ethiopia, present the mirror image of the Hittite paradox. The Hittites spoke the oldest wr...
The Hittites occupy a unique place in the linguistic prehistory of humanity. Their language, attested by the earliest wr...
The Samaritans are the most extreme genetic isolate in the Levant, and one of the most extreme in the world. A community...
Atlantis, as Plato describes it in the Timaeus and Critias around 360 BCE, is one of the most enduring narratives of the...
The Druze are among the most genetically distinctive populations of the modern Levant. As a religious community that for...
The Basques are the strangest population in Western Europe. They speak Euskara, the only surviving pre-Indo-European lan...
From Quebec City in 1608 to the Cajun bayous of Louisiana in 1785, the French presence in North America rests on a small...
Corsica has been a French department since 1768, when the bankrupt Republic of Genoa sold the island to Louis XV in the ...
For fifteen years, population genetics has rested on a methodological triptych: ADMIXTURE for decomposing genomes into K...
Modern Spaniards have far less North African ancestry than popular intuition assumes. Modelled on the Davidski Standard ...
Every Jewish community on Earth, from the Ashkenazim of Berlin to the Mizrahim of Baghdad, from the Italkim of Naples to...
Guest article by Steven Parker. Originally published on ashkenaziresearch.org on May 10, 2026 (revised May 16, 2026). Re...
For centuries, the history of human populations rested on three sources: ancient chronicles, archaeological excavations,...
White Americans are not a uniform population. Project the average G25 coordinates of each state onto a PCA of European r...
Project the Eupedia red-hair distribution map onto a map of Bell Beaker R1b-L21 frequencies and the overlay is almost pe...
Confused with the Roma by authorities for centuries, the Yenish ( Jenische in German, Yéniche in French) are in f...
Project a Sino-Mauritian genome into the 25-dimensional Global25 space and the result defies any single continental assi...
Project a Réunionnais genome into the 25-dimensional Global25 space and the result defies any single continental assignm...
Project the genomes of modern Sicilians into a 25-dimensional mathematical space and a paradox emerges: an island sittin...
Project the genomes of a thousand Europeans into a 25-dimensional mathematical space, reduce that space to its two princ...
For two and a half millennia, the Etruscans resisted explanation. Their language, unrelated to any known family, defied ...
Few genetic journeys in human prehistory rival the reach of haplogroup R1b-DF27. Its ultimate ancestor came from the Pon...
Sardinia occupies a unique position in the European genetic landscape. Shielded by the Mediterranean and largely spared ...
From the Pre-Columbian Andes to the Cosmopolitan Río de la Plata, Origins, Migration Waves and the Modern Gene Po...
Northern France has long stood in the shadow of Britain in the story of Bronze Age genetic replacement. The roughly 90% ...
When a result comes back from 23andMe, MyHeritage, or AncestryDNA announcing that you are "34% Scandinavian" or "12% Ana...
When a modern Croatian or Serbian individual runs their genome through an ancestry calculator, they encounter a result t...
When you look at a PCA plot and see Kazan Tatars sitting far below Russians on the East Asian axis, or Somalis clusterin...
Steppe Fathers, Neolithic Mothers: The Sex-Biased Demographic Revolution of the Bronze Age ExploreYourDNA • Populat...
The Roma, known as Gitanos in Spain, Tziganes in France, Zigeuner in Germany, are among the most genetically distinct po...
Browse social media long enough and you will inevitably encounter it: an African American DNA result showing 15 to 25% E...
India is home to over 1.4 billion people and one of the most complex genetic landscapes on Earth. When people from Chenn...
A single country. Twenty-one historical regions. And yet genetically, France does not exist as a unified bloc, it stretc...
Tools like HaploAI , Morley's MDKA predictor, and similar services promise to extract your Y-DNA or mtDNA haplogroup fro...
Browse social media long enough and you will inevitably encounter it: a photograph of a Kabyle child with blue or green ...
When Afrikaner individuals run their genomes through ancestry calculators, they encounter a predictable set of component...
G25 Calculator Ancient DNA Central-Western Europe ExploreYourDNA, Population Genetics • Calculator Spotlight If you...
Ancient DNA Roman Britain Forensic Genomics Craniometrics Debunked G25 Coordinates In 2012, a forgotten cardboard box in...
Of all the forces that have sculpted the human genome over the past ten millennia, one stands out for its sheer consiste...
The Roman Empire, at its height, ruled over roughly 60 million people across three continents. Its legions marched from ...
Why is multiple sclerosis (MS) twice as common in Scandinavia as in the Mediterranean? A groundbreaking study published ...
This article is a guest contribution by Steven Parker. It presents his interpretation of the genetic relationship betwee...
If you have Northwestern European ancestry and have tried modeling your heritage with G25 coordinates, you have probably...
A Breton is genetically closer to a Welshman than to someone from Provence. An Alsatian shares more common ancestors wit...
If you've taken a DNA test with 23andMe, AncestryDNA, or MyHeritage and received results like "British & Irish," "French...
Recent advances in paleogenomics are radically transforming our understanding of human mobility in prehistoric Europe. T...
Over the past 100,000 years, Homo sapiens has undertaken the most remarkable series of migrations in the history of life...
The evolution of European phenotypes, light skin, blue eyes, blond hair, and lactose tolerance, represents one of the mo...
Author: Piotr Kapuscinski | YourRootsDNA Published with the author's permission The genetic origins of Poles from Volhyn...
The Beaker Migration, Migration Routes, and the Trans-Channel Exchanges that Shaped Atlantic Europe Summary: Y-chromosom...
Understanding DNA test results for Berber populations, decoding Sardinian proxies, European components, and the limits o...
The Spanish colonization of the Americas (1492-1650) created one of the largest and most geographically dispersed admixt...
The Maya civilization, spanning over 3,000 years from the Preclassic period to the present day, left behind not only mag...
France's overseas territories span the globe, from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. Each territory car...
Disentangling Phoenician, Arabian, and Bedouin influences through ancient DNA modeling, from the Berber heartland to the...
France occupies a unique geographic position at the western edge of Europe, at the crossroads of north-south and east-we...
Between 2800 and 2000 BCE , Western Europe experienced one of the most dramatic population turnovers in human history. T...
Normandy , a region in northwestern France along the English Channel, carries in its very name the memory of its founder...
Among the most visually striking archaeological finds of early medieval Europe are the artificially elongated skulls dis...
The origins of the early Slavs remain one of the most debated questions in population genetics. A recent synthesis on Th...
From Normandy to Flanders, from southern England to the Netherlands and northern France, modern people of northwestern E...
From Taiwan to Easter Island: The Genetic Odyssey of the Polynesians Ancient DNA has transformed our understanding of th...
Across the world, a few human traits tell a remarkable story of how genes, culture, and environment have co-evolved. Two...
Among the forests and rivers of the central Volga-Kama region of Russia lives a small but remarkable population, the Udm...
Language and genes often tell different stories. Archaeogenetics shows that while migrations shape populations, cultural...
Recent ancient DNA discoveries are reshaping our understanding of Roman and early medieval Britain . Far from being an i...
23andMe has released its 2025 ancestry update , and overall the results are excellent. In our community, the improvement...
Population genetics · North Africa · Canary Islands · Amazigh For five centuries the indigenous Guanches of the Canary I...
Ancient DNA now traces Portugal's population history from Mesolithic foragers through the Neolithic transition, the Beak...
A recurring observation in population genetics is that Ashkenazi Jews often cluster with Southern Italians and Sicilians...
With the launch of our new ancient DNA test, many people are exploring their results with great enthusiasm. That's wonde...
The Roman Empire forged a vast and interconnected world, extending from Britain to the Euphrates. As imperial power shif...
In the silence of a 5th-century cemetery in Angers , in the heart of what is now western France, a man was buried. More ...
The Iberian Peninsula, today's Spain and Portugal, has long been a meeting point of diverse peoples and cultures from ac...
The edges of the Roman Empire were never barren limits. They were dynamic zones of exchange, settlement, and transformat...
For centuries, the Scythians ruled the vast Eurasian steppe from the Black Sea to the Altai Mountains. Described by Hero...
For centuries, the Phoenicians have been remembered as master sailors, tireless merchants, and skilled craftsmen. Origin...
France's population has undergone profound transformations over the past 9,000 years, shaped by successive waves of migr...
Introduction The Jewish people, dispersed across continents yet culturally cohesive, have long maintained traditions of ...
Introduction The question of how the Americas were first populated has long fascinated archaeologists and geneticists al...
Recent breakthroughs in ancient DNA have begun to rewrite our understanding of Iron Age Britain and its relationship wit...
R1b-L21 is one of the most prominent Y-chromosome haplogroups in modern Western Europe, with its highest frequencies in ...
In the heart of modern-day Mexico City, beneath centuries of stone and soil, lie silent witnesses to one of the most ove...
The settlement of Iceland in the late 9th century CE is one of the few European foundation events for which contemporary...
For most of the 20th century, the prehistory of central Asia was reconstructed primarily from archaeological cultures, l...
When the First Crusade reached the Levant in the late 11th century and Western European armies established the Crusader ...
When the Lombards crossed the Alps into Italy in 568 CE under King Alboin, they were the last of the great Germanic migr...
On a stretch of the northern Sicilian coast in 480 BCE, a Greek coalition led by Gelon of Syracuse and Theron of Akragas...
For nearly two thousand years, the Huns, Avars, and Magyars have occupied a permanent place in European historical imagi...
In the early medieval cemeteries of southern Germany, archaeologists have recovered for over a century a striking set of...
What Is Raw DNA Data? Raw DNA data is the digital file containing your unique genetic code, as determined by a consumer ...
The Malagasy are the most remarkable case of long-distance maritime migration documented in the human genome. They speak...
The Romani people are the most studied diaspora population in European population genetics, and the result of that scrut...
Western European genetic similarity is routinely explained through medieval and Roman-era events: the Norman Conquest of...
The popular geography of Celtic identity points to the Atlantic coasts: Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Brittany, Cornwall, Ga...
The Octagon at Ephesos is one of the great monumental tombs of the Hellenistic and early Roman Mediterranean, a small oc...
Ancient DNA | Roman Italy | Mystery file Pompeii's victims were not who we thought For a century and a half the plaster ...
Roman Britain was once imagined as a peripheral and culturally homogeneous province on the northwestern edge of the Empi...
Modern Greenlanders are one of the cleanest documented two-way admixture populations in the world. Genome-wide analyses ...
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